1. Technological Field
This technology pertains generally to image inpainting after object removal, and more particularly to recovering missing structures after object removal from an image.
2. Background Discussion
An image inpainting process involves reconstructing missing parts of an image frame, or video frame, that have been removed, or moved. If an object captured within an image is deleted, or moved, the area that was covered by (obscured by) that object in the original image, has to be reconstructed so that the resulting image still appears “natural” looking. Which is to say that it is desirable that if the viewer has not seen the original image, they would be unable to notice that the image has been altered by removing, or moving an object, therein.
There are a number of current inpainting techniques described in the literature. In general, these methods can be categorized into the following categories: (1) diffusion-based approaches, (2) sparse representation of images, and (3) exemplar-based approaches.
These methods can produce generally suitable outputs when the inpainting process involves homogeneous and/or small areas with no complicated structures. However, in scenes involving large missing areas with multiple occluded regions and structures, these techniques leave visible artifacts in the resultant image, especially in the edge and structured areas.
Accordingly, a need exists for inpainting reconstruction techniques which are able to generate desirable results even for large inpainted areas which include structure.